we watched Pearl Harbor in my classroom this week for the 80th remembrance day

[demtenjeep]

after listening to some of the comments of my students


we are SCREWED

if something like this ever happens again-we don't have the grit and determination that was evident then.




it makes me very sad

[DinahMoeHum]

1. Did you see a movie?

Was it Tora Tora Tora or that POS movie with Ben Affleck?

[Sympthsical]

2. One of my favorite Roger Ebert reviews

"Pearl Harbor" is a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Its centerpiece is 40 minutes of redundant special effects, surrounded by a love story of stunning banality. The film has been directed without grace, vision, or originality, and although you may walk out quoting lines of dialog, it will not be because you admire them.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/pearl-harbor-2001

[Effete Snob]

3. Seriously. By the time the Japanese show up...

…you are practically rooting for them.

And, c’mon, Dan Ackroyd? Did somebody lose a bet?

[thucythucy]

5. Isn't that the movie where John Voight plays FDR

and has this absurd and melodramatic scene where the president stands up on his own to inspire all the doomsayers around him?

Insulting and inaccurate and a cheap use of disability as "inspiration porn."

Blech!

[DinahMoeHum]

15. Yep.

What I found insulting were some of the CGI effects, where, among other things, they got the superstructure of the destroyers all wrong. They looked more like 1990s guided missle cruisers instead of 1920s-30s vessels.
And a lot of the explosions there looked orchestrated, like pyrotechnics at a rock concert.

[Paladin]

13. Ebert nailed it, as usual.

Utter piece-of-shit movie.

[MuseRider]

14. Exactly.

When it was fairly new a girl in my son's history class commented about it when they were studying the event. The teacher was astonished that the kids, at least some of them, thought that it was all real.

[thucythucy]

4. What exactly did they say that distressed you so?

Was it a general lack of knowlege about the events, or something else that made you sad?

[demtenjeep]

6. more along the lines of

I would have left

or

a lot of not me type comments.

they would have dodged the draft -wouldn't have fought back

just the general impression that we don't have people that would run to the fight but would run away

[Effete Snob]

10. A lot of well meaning people enlisted after 9/11

It’s probably hard for them to put themselves into the moment. How do they feel about our response to covid?

[thucythucy]

12. Well, if it's any consolation there was in fact a lot of nay-saying

by folks even after Pearl Harbor.

Gas rationing was a particular problem. The government tried to limit how much gas people could use, it also restricted the sale of new tires (much of our rubber came from Southeast Asia, occupied by the Japanese in the months before December 7). The same whining we hear today about masks and vaccines was evident from people complaining about gas and rubber rationing.

Some folks also objected to blackout regulations--along the coasts people were told to douse their lights or get blackout curtains so German U-boats couldn't use the light at night to target Allied shipping. It's an open question how many merchant marine crew members lost their lives because some "free dumb" loving proto-MAGAT wasn't going to let no government bureaucrat tell them what to do.

Beyond that there were riots and full out street battles between whites and non-whites--with whites of course instigating and perpetrating most of the violence. Google the "Zoot suit riots" in LA and you'll see what I mean. And the sight of people of color in uniform--training with weapons no less--drove some white supremacists over the wall into actual violence against American soldiers. Which I personally would define as "treason."

One of the ways we suffer by sugarcoating our history is it can make us hold unrealistic expectations for the present. Despite all the Hollywood and official blather, World War II was a time of deep division in this country, which of course was not unusual. And, as to be expected, conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats (Dixiecrats--i.e. future Republicans) did what they could to hamper and denigrate FDR's efforts to win the war.

I interact with some young people--granted probably not as many as you--and I'm heartened at how articulate and politically sophisticated so many of them are. Certainly the younger people i know in the disability rights movement are way ahead of where I was at their age.

I think the bigger problem is flat out ignorance about history. It amazes me to think, for instance, that Sarah Palin, the nominee of a major political party for Vice President of the United States--had to be told during the campaign that Germany, Japan and Italy were our opponents in World War II. It makes me wonder how she ever graduated from high school.

Anyway, this probably isn't helping your sadness any, so I'll stop.

Except to say, if you're looking for good films to show your class, I highly recommend the BBC series "World at War" narrated by Sir Lawrence Olivier. It's twenty some odd one hour episodes, but the one on the beginnings of the war in the Pacific--up to and including the attack on Pearl Harbor--is excellent, as is the rest of the series.

Best wishes, and hope you can recover some joy!

[Poiuyt]

16. Actually, there was a lot of patriotism after the Pearl Harbor attack

Last edited Sun Dec 12, 2021, 08:49 PM - Edit history (1)

It's true that before the attack, there was a lot of division about joining the battle to help Great Britain. But after the attack, there was no doubt about how Americans felt about joining the war. That's especially true because both Germany and Japan had declared war on the U.S. My father served in the USAAF in the war, but my wife's father received a F1 status and was very upset that he wasn't able to join his friends in the military. My mother told me how unified the country was in thoughts and deeds.

I won't deny that there may have been protests after Dec 7, but they would have been minor and would have been quickly shouted down.

[Tomconroy]

7. I don't know. I have confidence in our kids. America First was a

wildly popular movement before the war. Pearl Harbor came and it just disappeared.
If it comes to it, the kids will do fine.

[brewens]

8. I can't imagine anyone teaching the WWII homefront effort without direct comparison to our

COVID response. Sure, there were cheaters as far as rationing, black markets and stuff like that, but not out and out sabotage. Doing a good job on that though would probably get you fired these days.

[Effete Snob]

11. They tried

But we used to effectively deal with foreign infiltration https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/nazi-saboteurs-and-george-dasch

[brewens]

19. Yeah, but I mean sabotage by our own people. We didn't have angry disease spreading mobs showing up

protest gas rationing or making death threats against those enforcing it.

[Irish_Dem]

9. We would have lost WWII, just like we are now losing the war against us by the GOP, China and Russia

[tirebiter]

17. My grandfather arrived in SF on Dec 6, 1941 looking for a job.

Funny thing, 2 days later he had a job at Mare Island as a welder. He called family in Oklahoma and told them to stay there where it was safe.
My dad saw it as a chance to get the hell out of the dust bowl so he went to enlist in the Navy to fly. They told him to get 2 years in college and go through OTC. So he went into Jr college got his 2 years in and joined the navy then crossed over to the marines in 1943 and flew Corsairs for the duration. Landing a Corsair on an aircraft carrier was no easy task.
But it beat the life he had before Pearl Harbor.. He hadn’t lived in a house with a floor in it, or had a part of shoes in the summer before he was 12.

[Aristus]

18. "Kids today could never do what we did back in the War."

I hear that all the time and I dismiss it.

I believe absolutely that kids coming up today could do the things the so-called 'Greatest Generation' did during World War II.

The problem is: no one has asked them to. And when the time came, and America's youth stood up to help, their offer was rudely turned away.

After 9/11, the military recruiting stations were jammed with young people wanting to join up and take the fight to the people who had attacked us. Blood banks had lines around the block of people wanting to sacrifice for the greater good.

But there was no "Avenge Pearl Harbor" in the offing; no "Make The World Safe For Democracy."

The government told us not to ask them uncomfortable questions, and to just go shopping.

We heard less and less about Osama bin Laden as time went on, and more and more about a tinhorn dictator we vanquished ten years previously, and who had nothing to do with September 11th.

We ended up invading Iraq, even though no Iraqis attacked us on that bright September day.

We murdered anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million Iraqis, blitzkrieged their country, and de-stabilized the Middle East, all so some power-crazed oil executives could enrich themselves and their cronies.

Our brave young people, who enlisted to answer the horror of 9/11, ended up being sent to a spurious battlefield six, seven, even eight times to fight an enemy we created in a political think tank. Many died as a result of our government's fecklessness, and never lived to see the day when we did actually pay bin Laden back for his terror-mongering.

We never made any real attempt to end Afghanistan's usefulness as a terrorist training camp, and in fact fanned the flames of the kind of murderous resentment that creates terrorists, instead.

Both those wars, thankfully, are over after two long, bruising, discouraging decades.

How long will it take to repair the justifiable cynicism our young people have toward military service and sacrificing for the greater good?

That's a question I can't answer.

[hatrack]

20. Or, to quote C-Plus Augustus . . . .

"We need to counter the shock wave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates." - George W. Bush 10/4/01